layout: page title: FAQ

  • TOC {:toc}

What browser does best on web-platform-tests?

This is a question we‘ve strongly avoided answering: we don’t want to publish any comparison tables as doing so has previously led to testsuites being used for marketing, which has then led to lower quality testsuites.

For example, we've previously had:

  • Vendors release only tests that they pass (with obvious omissions),
  • Vendors release thousands of near-identical tests (increasing their pass percentage and making it closer to other vendors who passed the existing tests), and
  • Vendors delay releasing tests until they have shipped a product that passes them (leading to duplication of effort and other vendors fail to correctly handle some edge-cases that the delayed testsuite covered).

Why can't web-platform-tests be used for caniuse.com?

web-platform-tests provides a large number of tests for each standard, and most web developers would consider an implementation good enough to rely on in sites they develop before the implementation passes every test. This means simply waiting for a 100% pass-rate doesn't work as a data source.

At the same time, it is useful to note when an implementation has significant shortcomings (i.e., issues web developers are likely to run into), and this means you need some level of analysis of the failures to decide which are likely to be hit and which are very obscure edge-cases. This is complicated by some specs having a fairly small number of tests for the common case, and a disproportionate amount of the testsuite taken up by tests for edge-case behavior.

As such, you cannot come up with a purely algorithmic solution to determine what features you want to consider supported, which partially supported, and which unsupported.